If the Supreme Court had never granted “personhood” rights to corporations, would they still be trammeling the rights of citizens and riding roughshod over communities and nature? Would we have democracy?
By deciding 5-4 in the Citizens United case, the US Supreme Court expanded corporations’ ability to spend money to influence our elections, and reignited the controversy over corporate personhood. A bevy of campaigns have emerged to challenge it, through litigation or via a Constitutional amendment. Abolishing corporate personhood is necessary, but our entire system of law is engineered to keep decision making out of the hands of the people.
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Pittsburgh has taken a stand against corporate power and has just become the first major U.S. city to adopt a rights-based ordinance that includes the legal rights for nature. Communities like Pittsburgh are discovering their lack of decision-making power in their own communities and are taking a stand through a rights-based approach. Pittsburgh’s ability to take on corporate injustice says a lot about the future of communities to truly stop unwanted harm rather than just postpone it.
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Blog Action Day: Water. It is widely understood that the ecosystems we as humans rely on to survive are diminishing, depleting, and drying up. Water— most essential to life– is being privatized and mismanaged at the cost of people’s heath and livelihoods, namely by multi-national corporations that are extracting water from communities without their consent.
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Mt. Shasta needs our help. Their struggle is bigger than the tiny town of Mt. Shasta. They are on the frontlines of challenging corporate power, and changing the way the law works for all of us. We must stand up for their rights, as they stand for ours.
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BREAKING NEWS FROM MT. SHASTA, CA: On Friday, August 20, the Mt. Shasta Community Rights Project filed an elections complaint to restore Measure A to the 2010 general election ballot. Siskiyou County Clerk Colleen Setzer is denying Mt. Shasta voters the right to vote on “Measure A”, which was stripped from the city’s ballot earlier this week.The Measure, which would prohibit outside corporations from bulk water extraction and corporate cloud seeding, is the first ordinance of its kind in California because it is designed to assert the rights of residents over the rights of corporations.
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This spring, Mt. Shasta voters petitioned in favor of Measure A, an ordinance that, if passed, would assert the community’s right to ban bulk water extraction and chemical cloud seeding within city limits. The City Council voted to send the measure to the ballot in November. But an unforeseen technical error may cause the measure to be dropped from the ballot; the City Council will decide tonight.
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